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Immaturity

James O’Keefe thinks he can “punk” a CNN reporter by pretending to seduce her on camera. A state assistant attorney general who looks oddly like Peewee Herman spends months harassing the openly gay president of his alma mater’s student body. Two college freshmen use a hidden camera to stream — live on the Internet — the gay sexual encounter of another freshman.

Do we have an epidemic of people who haven’t progressed past their 15th birthdays?

That last one is particularly tragic. Tyler Clementi, just 18, was so horrified by not only being outed live on the internet but by having his sex live spilled out there for the world to see that he jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River. Somebody somewhere noted that Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the two morons who played this dastardly “prank” on Clementi, will have to live with this for the rest of their lives. I sure hope so, because Clementi won’t get to live the rest of his life at all, and his parents and others who loved him will live with the horror of his death for the rest of theirs.

Andrew Shirvell, the homophobic moron assistant AG in Michigan, is now banned from the campus of the University of Michigan. It’s people like him that make me wish I’d been the one to think up Dickipedia, because right about now he’d be the featured Dick. And right alongside him would be his boss, Mike Cox, who says “oh, no, I can’t just fire him. That would violate his first amendment rights.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all have the right to be a dick. But seriously, do you want someone with that level of maturity in that kind of position? Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who used to be the attorney general, knows the answer to that question. She tweeted it.

If I was still Attorney General and Andrew Shirvell worked for me, he would have already been fired.

Now there’s a governor who can use Twitter without sounding like an idiot.

Sure Shirvell took a “voluntary leave of absence,” which means either a) he’ll stay off the job until my ADD colleagues move on to the next shiny object or b) Shirvell finds a new job and this is all done with.

And O’Keefe. Jesus H. Christ on a cross. Why is this guy not in jail? Or juvenile detention? He destroyed ACORN with heavily edited videos (thanks to a bunch of other dicks in the U.S. Congress who couldn’t be bothered to find the facts — not unlike a bunch of other dicks in the Obama administration who couldn’t be bothered to get the facts on Shirley Sherrod. But at least the truth came out faster on her — by the time the truth about O’Keefe and the ACORN videos came out, my colleagues had moved on to Lindsay Lohan’s latest tribulations and couldn’t have cared less). And O’Keefe, then he got caught trying to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. Dick, dick dick. But now — finally — even the conservatives are getting the picture that this guy’s a liability. The National Review:

This CNN episode ought to convince all conservatives that not only should O’Keefe’s behavior be condemned, but conservative leaders and organizations need to do a better job of assessing the maturity level and character of the people they hire, support, or praise.

Well, duh. Hold the presses on that one. O’Keefe’s plot was steeped in sexism, not unlike many teenaged boys who haven’t been taught how to behave in public.

But these guys aren’t the only idiots opening their mouths to prove it. Joe Miller, the wannabe senator in Alaska, tweeted a series of notes about how he should be checking out office furniture and doing some house-hunting and such while he’s in Washington, you know, because he’s guaranteed to win the election and all. Of course, he’s blamed a staffer who now won’t be able to tweet on Joe’s account. Really? A staffer? Right. I guess it was the same staffer who tweeted “What’s the difference between selling out your parties values and the world’s oldest profession” as Lisa Murkowski, the senator he beat in the Republican primary — weighed the idea of a write-in candidacy. Murkowski, who decided to run that race and actually leading him right now — had a little to say about his most recent tweets. Well, actually it was her spokesman.

For someone who wants to be a freshman senator, this is pretty sophomoric.

Then there’s Erick “RedState” Erickson, who can’t stop tweeting he wants to “beat someone to a bloody pulp,” and this after he deleted his tweets calling then-Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “child-molesting goat fucker.” And CNN still thinks it’s a good idea to pay him to appear on air and spew his bullshit to the world. At least then CNN president Jon Klein did. Maybe new president Ken Jautz will think better of it. Oh, wait. Jautz was the guy who first put Glenn Beck on television. Glenn Beck, the former shock jock, and we all know how mature those guys are.

Remember Joe Wilson? He was so grown-up that he shouted “You lie!” at President Obama as he was addressing a joint session of Congress.

And don’t get me started on Carl Paladino, the TeaPublican candidate for governor in New York. OK, so maybe he’s not really immature. He’s just a asshole.

But for all these folks, and many other just like them, I have but one question: